Industrial and other complex machine equipment or assets may be engineered to perform particular tasks as part of industrial, manufacturing, monitoring or business processes. For example, industrial assets can include, among other things and without limitation, manufacturing equipment on a production line, wind turbines that generate electricity on a wind farm, healthcare or imaging devices (e.g., X-ray or MRI systems) or patient monitoring devices for use in patient care facilities, or drilling equipment for use in mining operations. The design and implementation of these assets often takes into account both the physics of the task at hand, as well as the environment in which such assets are configured to operate.
Low-level software and hardware-based controllers have long been used to configure, operate and monitor these assets. However, the rise of inexpensive cloud computing, increasing sensor capabilities, and decreasing sensor costs, as well as the proliferation of mobile technologies have created opportunities for creating novel industrial assets with improved sensing technology that are capable of transmitting data that can then be transmitted to a network. As a consequence, there are many new opportunities to enhance the value of some industrial assets using novel industrial-focused hardware and software.
One important aspect of the use of data generated by industrial assets and other types of devices is that the data may be distributed to mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablet computers) carried by individuals who are “on the go” but need or wish to be kept up to date on the data produced or stored in a network. Previous proposals for distributing data from central data repositories have often assumed that devices intended to receive the data from a central source are connected to the central source by reliable and substantially uninterrupted communication channels. However that assumption may not hold if mobile devices are to be the recipients of the data, particularly where the users of such devices may be in the field and subject to intermittent mobile network connectivity. In other words, transmitting streams of data to mobile devices from central data repositories present problems, as well as opportunities, not involved with data distribution to reliably-connected devices.